essjay's Reviews (635)

I just want to give Nimona all the squishes. 

I don't even know how to rate this. It was so good, but also I could only read it in small chunks bc it was so abjectly miserable. I will never read it again, but I'm glad I did and will probably be thinking about it for a very long time. 

I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did, but it was exactly what I wanted after the last few books I either didn't particularly enjoy or left me feeling emotionally drained. This did the opposite and charged my batteries I didn't even realize were low.  

If I had read this book 20-25y ago, I probably would have loved it. As it stood currently, I just found it exhausting and more than a little boring and pretentious. I understand that Dorothy is supposed to be unlikable, but I just hated spending time in her head. There were a few instances where I was like "okay, the author clearly doesn't know what [this dish] entails, bc those are not the ingredients for it," which seems fairly egregious for a supposed über-foodie serial killer?

At 29% I was angry at the lack of promised cannibalism and swore to myself if someone wasn't eaten by 40%, I'd be ragequitting. Unluckily, a piece of someone was eaten by 35% and so I finished, cursing myself the entire time. 

"Move over Bret Easton Ellis," said Kirkus, but who the fuck still reads and enjoys BEE these days, unless you're under 20 and still think this shit is simply fraught with meaning?

Bleh.  

I kind of struggled to get into this at first, but at about 30% started really digging it. The ending was lovely.  Reading this made me feel like other people seem to feel while reading Cat Valente and Erin Morgenstern, both of whom I've never really enjoyed. 

I don't yet know how to rate this, if at all. I cried a lot while reading it, and then fell into some existential angst at the thought of how I'd handle the same situation.  

This was FINE. Nothing was particularly good, but nothing was particularly terrible, either. I have forgotten pretty much everything, except for that one story made me want laddu. 

What an abrupt ending. I liked it, but had to not think too hard about how many things just didn't make sense.  

Not my favourite Toby outing, but quite solid. The entire story takes place in a day, and that's how long it took to read.